Photo 104611575 | River Fire © Tedy11 | Dreamstime.com (paid for image)
“What took you so long to get here?” Jamis asked as I quickly and silently entered through the side door of the warehouse.
After pulling down my ash mask, I bared my teeth at him in frustration. “Why do you think? The river is on fire again and the Atkoony is closed until they have a chance to check out the cement. They don’t want another failure like the Memorial.” I started unloaded my haul, brick after brick of happy dust in solid form.
“How the fuck do rivers even catch fire? It’s fucking water.” My buyer lifts each brick with a gloved hand but doesn’t run his normal tests. We are both running late. He is always late and I had to walk nearly three miles out of my way to find a bridge open.
Jamis knows me and knows I would have run all the tests before I delivered. Unless one of my manufacturers buried something deep in a brick, everything is good. “Industry got to dump stuff somewhere. Air and water takes the crap away.”
“Hardly. What is this, like the fourth time this year?” He starts packing the bricks into his bags to take to the distributor, Mad Jones. We are both cogs in his machine. Jamis holds up one brick, studying the crafter mark in the solitary electric light left on for whoever would be opening the warehouse later this morning. “I thought we dumped Spectre.”
“He OD’ed, it’s his daughter now and she doesn’t use.”
“Hmm. Half price for that one.”
“Already done. She knows we are taking a risk, but she will need to upgrade the equipment so if this one is good…” I raise an eyebrow.
“Do you even trust her equipment?”
“Barky recently needed to relocate.” My bags empty, I stick one inside the other and tuck them under my coat. “She used the parts of his equipment for the bits where her old man skimped too long until he got a new place. He watched her and approved.”
“Should have led with that.” He grunted, tucking the questionable brick on top. “Still only worth half-price.”
“Don’t be cheap.”
“What are we, CEOs? We pay our people.”
I rock foot to foot. “Speaking of…”
“Here.” He hands me something the size of a brick, but the weight is completely different.
I don’t bother counting it here. Morning shift will be hitting the docks soon. A lot of ships have taken to having steel keels to get through the fires, so the present burn won’t hold back much of the commerce. I will count it at home before distributing it out to my makers. Need to pay them proper and then get the new equipment for those who need it. Happy dust needs serious safety measures to keep from becoming airborne during the crafting. I don’t need any more addicts in the supply line. The CEOs may like poisoning their people, but we don’t. There ain’t many people with the skill to make dust.
“Independence week is next month, holidays usually see an uptick.” The mob thug lifts his bags and heads to his car to take the stash to the packagers.
“Two more bricks?” I ask, frowning, running through the list of people who aren’t already at capacity. I had been lucky that Spectre’s daughter had wanted to take over. Two over my normal supply in a month may be doable.
“Five.”
I narrow my eyes backing toward my door. “I’ll see what I can do.”
Jamis isn’t usually unreasonable. Which means something is happening upstairs, something I rather not know about but I am going to need to know about if I am going to keep my people alive.
“You do that,” he says getting in his car.
Outside the morning tide had moved the burning slick further inland. I might be able to get across the Burgundy Walk if I rush it. The metal frame didn’t seem impacted by the fires so far. Rain though had been eating at it.
Well, it’s not like anything can fix problems like air you can’t breathe and water that burns. That is stuff only the big people can fix and they aren’t going to. It’s just a fact of life in the big city. And to take everyone’s mind off of it, people need happy dust. To ignore air that is ash, rain that eats metal, and water that burns.
(words 738; first published 4/30/2024)
Sadly, this sounds like a very near future.
Even more sadly, the concept is based on the late 1960’s before we got environmentally better. You lived in a city and pollution was just a way of life.
And now we are returning to it.